


Names

by AngelusErrare



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Canon deaths, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Memorials
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-17
Updated: 2014-05-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 11:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1647455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelusErrare/pseuds/AngelusErrare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Day after day, Shepard watches the Memorial Wall fill with names, and day after day, she wonders how many more will be added before she is done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Names

**Author's Note:**

> Right after the Citadel attack.

It starts with twenty-one names.

Twenty-one people, twenty-one faces, and twenty-one families she failed.

Some memories are more vivid than others, some failures more terrible-- _Ashley acknowledging her choice on Virmire, knowing there is no way both she and Kaidan will survive_ \-- and each one is a nightmare she will never forget.

The crew of the original _Normandy_ , twenty men and women killed when the Collectors attacked.

She could have saved them. Should have saved them. But she didn't.

It starts with twenty-one names, but soon there are more. 

Garrus tells her it isn't her fault, that it just isn't possible to save everyone, that sometimes there's no winning outcome. She thought she proved him wrong when she pulled everyone out of the impossible mission alive. Every crew member, every man and woman on her team

 _Mordin smiling in the elevator. "Had to be me"_ \-- did it? Did it really? Couldn't somebody else have gone up into that crumbling tower to distribute the cure, or better yet, a drone? A tool that could have fixed it all without sacrificing one of the greatest men she had known?

Couldn't it have been her, bursting into flames brighter than the Tuchanka sun, falling at the center of the inferno even as the radiance of the Shroud cast the cure into the sky?

Why did someone have to die?

Tali'Zorah, gentle, gentle Tali'Zorah reminds her Mordin wanted to set right everything he had done to alter the genophage, but dammit, knowing that doesn't help. It only deepens the ache in her chest every time she sees his name and remembers him humming in the labs, always trying to perfect cures for everything in the galaxy, always questioning his past and his motives and wondering if he truly did the right thing.

 _Thane lying wounded in the Citadel, telling her he has time and knowing it is running out. Kolyat inviting her to read the prayer beside him even as his father, her lover, lies dying on the hospital bed. "His last wish was for you"_ \-- stupid, determined fool of a drell! He should have stayed back, shouldn't have fought, shouldn't have died. She could have fought Kai Leng, could have saved the Councilor without losing him.

Sometimes she passes the memorial and weeps.

There are more names; for some reason they are not on the wall, but they remain forever in her head-- _Kelly Chambers, shot during the attack on the Citadel_ \-- just as the nameless faces plague her sleepless nights. Civilians, militia, children, innocents of all species that lay forgotten under the rubble of buildings and ships or floating unprotected in the vast darkness of space. The many human colonists taken by the Collectors for their creation of that _thing_ she, Garrus and Thane had nearly died defeating.

Her men on Akuze are not on that wall. Their identities remain only in her memories and those of their families.

She eyes the spaces on the wall that have no plaques and wonders when they will all be filled. When her life will claim so many lives the wall won't be able to hold them-- but hasn't it already? So many names left unlisted, so many people who should have lived to see the end. So many fallen soldiers and colonists, parents and children, humans and aliens alike.

How many more will die before the Reapers are gone? How many more families will be torn apart, how many more friends will she mourn, how many more lives will be snuffed out and forgotten by the time this is over?

This war is far from over. The Crucible is not yet complete, but when it is, how will she be able to live with the weight of so many names in her mind?


End file.
